The latest episode of TrashBlanc TV is up on TrashBlanc.com covering the current salt crisis in Britain. Some shocking findings.

We covered the appalling Irish Pork Crises on TrashBlanc.com TV on Sunday. Here’s the video and the link.

Interesting article in today’s NYTimes by Judith Warner. It’s largely a critique on the Republican Party and how the selection of Sarah Palin is a regressive step for the advancement of women. Well and good. Here’s the interesting part though. TV has flip flopped the situation whereby a candidate no longer needs to be able to empathize with his constituents, instead, the voters must feel a connection with the candidate.

One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to. This need isn’t limited to women; it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn’t new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them.

But in the past, it was possible to fill that need through empathetic connection. Few Depression-era voters could “relate” to Franklin Roosevelt’s patrician background, notes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It was his ability to connect to them that made them feel they could connect to him,” she told me in a phone interview.

The age of television, Goodwin believes, has made the demand for connection more immediate and intense. But never before George W. Bush did it quite reach the beer-drinking level of familiarity. “Now it’s all about being able to see your life story in the candidate, rather than the candidate, with empathy, being able to relate to you.”